Cash-for-votes scam politically motivated: Ram Vilas Paswan

The uproar over the cash-for-votes scam in the parliament by the opposition parties were politically motivated as similar allegations had also been raised against the major opposition party, said Ram Vilas Paswan, president of the Lok Jansakthi Party.

Landing here from Delhi on Thursday, the party supremo said that the controversy was the brainchild of a group of persons who wanted to take advantage of the ensuing crisis following the chaos.

“It remains very strange that how some of these people could manage to bring in wads of currency notes inside the parliament. After all, the BJP has also been also facing allegations on similar counts’’, he told The Hindu.

He was of the view that the cables released by WikiLeaks were not corroborative enough to prove that such a scam had taken place during the trust vote on July 22, 2008.

During the period, he, along with Laluprasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh also released a CD showing that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had ’stage-managed’ the episode for political gains.

The former union minister also spoke of his plans to form an alternative electoral alliance called the Secular Democratic Front (SDF) in Kerala during the upcoming assembly elections and said that a strategy would be worked out specifically for the state through discussions with the other constituent parties in the alliance.

“We propose to offer an alternative option for the people of Kerala where all sections of the society will get their due’’, said Abdul Khaliq, the LJP Secretary General, who accompanied the party president.

According to him, people in Kerala were fed up with the ruling and opposing coalitions in Kerala and the SDF comprising about seven parties including the CPI (ML) would prove to be a way out for them.